Neelie Kroes hasn’t given a public opinion about zero-rated mobile content and apps, but her office has told anti-zero-rating advocates that it’s a competition issue rather than a net neutrality issue. It’s up to her successor, Andrus Ansip, to clear things up.

As journalist/programmer Stijn Debrouwere has argued in a persuasive essay about the challenges facing the news business, journalism isn’t being disrupted just by different forms of journalism — it’s being disrupted by things that don’t even look like journalism

T-Mobile crusade against mobile contracts is showing no mercy, not even to small regional carriers like U.S. Cellular. It will pay the contract termination fees for any customer that switches to its network.

Report

“Socialized business process” — the idea of adding social tools to traditional business processes — is unlikely to work in the long term. The enterprise is now transitioning to social network–based communication as introduced by social tools, and there is a fundamental conflict in communication models with business-process-centric business. In order to better explore these rapidly changing dynamics, this report presents a new cultural model for doing business in the 21st century.

Carrier mobile data revenues are set to pass mobile voice revenues in the fourth quarter, according to analyst Chetan Sharma. When that happens carriers will find themselves facing a fundamentally different kind of business.

Both Sprint and T-Mobile have maintained that shared data plans or for suckers. The exception, though, is the business customer. Both companies are delving into small business shared plans to fend off Verizon and AT&T.

It’s always a risk building on top of another technology platform, although building on Facebook’s API has obvious benefits when you’re starting out. But if you pick that route? Be sure to note how quickly the company is changing.

Apple’s wholesale support for LTE across its devices means that 4G network deployment can really get rolling. As these new networks go online, carriers will be forced to start lowering the price of mobile data. It won’t happen immediately, but it will happen.

Midwestern regional carrier Cellcom won’t reveal how many iPhones it sold last quarter, but according to CEO Pat Riordan the specific numbers are irrelevant. The iPhone is luring new customers into its stores, it’s keeping old customers loyal, and it completes Cellcom’s smartphone portfolio.

Adding 1 million customers in the second quarter, French ISP Iliad’s upstart wireless operator is still up-ending France’s mobile market. Though its momentum has slowed since its stellar 2.6 million-activation launch quarter, the company is still growing rapidly at the expense of France’s incumbents.

When the FCC and DOJ crushed AT&T’s $39 billion acquisition of T-Mobile, the competition gods rejoiced. But today regulators are content to let pass a Verizon-cable spectrum deal that would have huge implications for residential broadband competition. So much for the golden age of telecom regulation.

For $300, people in the Northeast, presumably in areas where Comcast competes with Verizon’s fiber to-the-home offering, can soon get 305 Mbps service from Comcast. The fastest tier is expensive, but its the doubling off other Comcast speed tiers at no cost that will hurt Verizon.

Though AT&T’s smartphone penetration is well over 60 percent, it keeps activating new smart devices at a rapid clip. AT&T remained the carrier of choice for iPhone customers. It added 3.7 million iPhones in the second quarter, 22 percent of which came from competitors.

Confused by how AT&T’s new shared-data planswork? Well, we’ve put together a primer to show you how they work and compare them to Verizon’s similar pricing structure. Ultimately, shared data might not be for you, but hopefully this guide will help clear up the confusion.

When Verizon announced its new shared-data plans, it should have enjoyed a big advantage over its archrival AT&T. Consumers had been demanding the right to pool data, and Verizon was the first carrier to deliver. Instead, Verizon fumbled, and AT&T has picked up the ball.

AT&T revealed the shared data plans it’s been hinting at for so long. The new pricing structure looks very similar to the shared tiers Verizon announced last month with two key differences: AT&T’s plans are optional for new and existing customers, and they’re slightly cheaper.

This week’s announcement by Google of its new Compute Engine cloud offering is a big deal, but most commentators are missing the real reason Google will get some stalwart Amazon customers to give Compute Engine a try. Performance, not scale, could be Google’s real differentiator.

Philipp Humm is out at T-Mobile, and we don’t know why. Whatever the reason, the move is sudden, and T-Mobile finds itself looking for a new chief executive. We have some unsolicited advice for whomever that replacement will be: Don’t mess with Humm’s work.

France’s Bouygues Telecom is working with virtual hotspot network Devicescape to give its smartphone customers seamless access to 8 million open Wi-Fi access points globally, replicating – at least fractionally – one of the key differentiators Iliad’s Free Mobile has on the competition: a 4 million-node offload network.

In its attempts to kill Verizon’s mega-spectrum deal with the cable operators, T-Mobile has begun challenging Verizon’s claims that it is the most efficient user of mobile spectrum in the country. But T-Mo is countering Verizon’s fuzzy math with equally fuzzy math of its own.

The first official casualty reports emerged this week in Free Mobile’s price war against Frances’ mobile powers that be. Orange reported a 615,000 subscriber loss. But while people are flocking to Free in droves there are signs of trouble ahead for the upstart operator.

Wireless industry veteran Whitey Bluestein writes that it isn’t a question of if Apple will offer its own mobile service. It’s merely a question of when. Apple has all of the infrastructure and ambition. And most importantly it has leverage over the operators.

Verizon’s biggest critics have banded together to try and block its purchase of 4G airwaves from the cable providers – or at least delay it. Sprint, DirecTV, FairPoint and multiple consumer and industry policy groups have joined the CWA’s petition to halt regulatory proceedings over the deal.

Verizon plans milk as much revenue off of its 3G and LTE networks as possible, becoming the “premium” mobile data operator, but its plan could backfire. Despite the increase in 4G sales, Verizon is still primarily a 3G operator, and 3G doesn’t justify its steep prices.

Verizon’s blockbuster deal with the major cable operators has made casualties of its future residential broadband expansion plans and its partnership with DirecTV. Verizon is wasting little time in embracing its rivals Comcast and Time Warner and overturning the competitive dynamics of the residential broadband industry.

The spectrum deal that Verizon signed to buy the unused airwaves from the nation’s top cable providers signals the moment that the consumer benefits of the convergence of voice, video and data hit the wall. It’s a deal that’s great for Verizon and bad for consumers.

Verizon filed its second suit against the network neutrality laws today, sparking more debate over who can determine how content traverses the Internet. Meanwhile, a paper suggests that the Internet delivers up to $5,686 in economic value, and says that value is at risk.

Sometimes knowing you are observed is enough to make you behave well. And the recent hoopla over AT&T releasing unredacted merger filings and an FCC request for more data, raise the question of how much transparency the FCC should sacrifice to protect competitive information.

Technology used by ISPs as well as regulatory decisions have shaped the Internet. The New America Foundation sees danger in the current evolution of the Internet as the web becomes segregated by what people are allowed to access and the cost of that access.

Sometimes it’s not what you say, but what you don’t say that matters, and in today’s release of the annual wireless competition report, the Federal Communications Commission silence speaks volumes. The problem is, no one knows what that silence is saying.

Allied Fiber may be able to do something the FCC can’t: help make American broadband just a bit more competitive. In a few weeks it will begin construction on its new type of optical network. It’s six months late, but better late than never.

Large companies hiring PR firms to plant negative stories about their competitors isn’t a new phenomenon, but Facebook’s attempt to do this about Google and privacy isn’t just ironic, it’s a sign of how scared the social network really is about competition from the web giant.

The iPad is making headlines today for dominating the global tablet market during the last quarter, accounting for 95.5 percent of all shipments. It’s a big number, but it’s also a statistic that belies the nature of the clash to come for tablet devices.

When we work alone, away from the constant prying eyes of colleagues and supervisors, we tend to lose our competitive edge. I’ve noticed this in myself, too. I haven’t exactly been slacking off or taking my work for granted, but I feel like something’s missing.

Certain parts of my business are what I’m increasingly becoming known for, and if I hope to continue standing out in these areas, I have to continue to seek excellence, and to me, excellence is not the same as perfection.

The recent flurry of announcements regarding devices that can be used to play movies and other video-based content, delivered via the Internet, on the TV, has many in the industry believing that the tide is finally turning. The numbers, however, tell a somewhat different story.